Dr. Bbandama Makwati took a very unique route to arrive at the medical clinic in Castlegar, British Columbia (BC): from Zambia, to China, the USA, and South Africa before settling in Castlegar. One might ask, of all the choices available to his family, why did Castlegar top the list?

"My family is the most important thing to me," said Dr. Makwati. "We love nature and we wanted a place that had lots of opportunities for the whole family. We looked at many places but when we thought about Castlegar, my wife and I both had the same feeling: Castlegar feels like home. And for my career, I was looking for a place where I could do both general practice and emergency medicine that had lots of continuing professional development opportunities – Castlegar has it all."

Dr. Parveen Ali and her husband may hail from a tropical country, but they love fresh snow. It is a good thing they do, because they live in Fort St. John, British Columbia, which gets an average annual snowfall of 183 centimetres.

The couple moved from Bangladesh in 2000, just after Dr. Ali had finished medical school at Sir Salimullah Medical College in the capital city of Dhaka. Her husband, Nakib, landed a job as a banker in Fort St. John. “It was a land of opportunity, so he wanted to come here,” she explained.

In England, Dr. Dodo commuted two hours to get to work. Following his move to Nanaimo BC in 2014, it now takes him 12 minutes to get to the clinic, and just 10 minutes to the ocean. The move has created opportunities for his son (age 5) and daughter (age 7) too.

Dr. Damon Tedford is a fan of tales of survivalists and self-sufficient men of the woods. So when adventure called, he answered. When his locum emergency physician position at Surrey Memorial Hospital ended in October 2014, Dr. Tedford left for Alaska to train and later participate in the Yukon Quest: a 1,600 km dogsled race.